Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection that includes manuscripts and correspondence by, to, and about Hunt and the Hunt family. The manuscripts include holographs of poems; notes; "Recollections and Memorandums Written during my Imprisonment in Surrey Jail"; an account of an amateur performance at Manchester for the benefit of Leigh Hunt; a manuscript poem by Charles Lamb in Lamb's hand; a translation by Hunt of Torquato Tasso's poem, "Amyntas"; and miscellaneous autograph material. The correspondence includes letters, dating from 1806 to [1859], from the author to Arthur Brooke, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Byron, Henry Colburn, John Forster, R. H. Horne, Marianne Hunt (Leigh Hunt's wife), Henry Moxon, Charles Ollier, Edmund Ollier, and others. The correspondence also includes letters relating to the author, dating from 1772 to 1883, between various correspondents including William Harrison Ainsworth, Thornton Leigh Hunt, George Henry Lewes, A. S. Procter, and Mrs. Russell Sturgis, as well as letters to and from members of the Hunt family, relations in America and others, most of the letters relating to property at Port Royal near Philadelphia, left to Leigh Hunt and his brothers through his mother, Mary Shewall. There are letters to Hunt from Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, John Hunt, John Keats, Charles Lamb, Walter Savage Landor, Percey Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, William Makepeace Thackeray, and others dating from 1813 to 1859.
The Leigh Hunt collection of papers are arranged in three series: